Introduction

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How does Marxism matter for ‘India’ and India for ‘Marxism’? What changes as a result and what new offerings appear because of this rather unique interaction between Marxism and the Indian situation, condition, subject-position? Keeping this as the backdrop, the book brings to dialogue three angles. First, it focuses on the concept: class. Class as the process of surplus labour (expanded in Marx’s book Capital and The Theories of Surplus Value), as distinct from class as power, property and income; it sees class not as a noun or a group of people but as an adjective to a verb, i.e. process. Second, it foregrounds the concept: overdetermination. Overdetermination, as against essentialist and determinist causality, in the context of both epistemological and ontological questions. The inter-twining of these two concepts sets off a process of rethinking Marxism, rethinking in the direction of class-focused Marxian theory (henceforth designated as ‘Marxian theory’ in the book) in which class and non-class processes (i.e. political, cultural, natural and the other economic processes) are in mutually constitutive relation. Here class processes pertaining to surplus labour are economic processes; which can exist only in mutual constitution with other non-class processes, economic and non-economic. Thus this particular Marxian theory is class-focused but not class/economic specific; what we refer to as economic is hence constitutionally social.